Like that lawyer who can't stop telling you that he went to Harvard, 50 Cent spends a preposterous amount of time reminding people that he got shot nine times.

The rapper's injuries are detailed in about half of his songs, his late-night talk show appearances, his biography, his recent movie and now his video game, 50 Cent: Bulletproof -- a fully interactive revenge fantasy based extremely loosely on the performer's near-death experience.

The disc is a must-have for 50 Cent completists, fortified with music videos and dozens of songs, including a new track, remixes, remixes of remixes and instrumentals that can be programmed as background music during the game. As a video game, however, Bulletproof is tedious and often frustrating, featuring a difficult control scheme that makes all the rhyming and stealing barely worth the effort.

While 50 Cent is the top-selling rapper of the past few years, it's easy to argue that he's overrated. Despite having the best line in a rap song so far this century ("We only humans girl/ we make mistakes/ To make it up I do whatever it take/ I love you like a fat kid love cake"), the Queens native born as Curtis Jackson certainly hasn't achieved the Jay-Z/Eminem/Ice Cube echelon of elite rapperdom.

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But he's a natural choice for a video game crossover, epitomizing reckless violence like none of his peers since Death Row Records capo Suge Knight was in his prime. Fifty hasn't dangled Vanilla Ice over a roof yet, but with his tendency to wear a bulletproof vest as a fashion accessory while rolling with the thuggish G Unit, the rapper is pretty close to living a video game life already.

Bulletproof features 50 Cent and his crew -- Lloyd Banks, Young Buck and Tony Yayo -- running through New York and gunning down an endless supply of cartoonish enemies. Along the way he gets help from producers Dr. Dre and Eminem, who provide voices for, respectively, a weapons dealer and a corrupt cop.

The game was written by "Sopranos" executive producer Terry Winter, and judging by the dialogue, he was paid every time he used a certain racial epithet. There's very little to 50 Cent: Bulletproof other than getting from Point A to Point B, sometimes completing an incredibly easy task along the way, such as shooting a control panel.

Bulletproof does have a few small pleasures. The best is the counter-kill feature, which allows excessively violent and highly inventive finishing moves that can be used when you're close enough to grab an enemy. The counter kills are more creative than anything in the game's plot, with arms snapping, guns flying in the air and fists hitting faces with the choreography of a good ballet. If the toy soldiers in "Nutcracker" had moves like this, I might actually buy a ticket.

Close-range carnage aside, most of the action is surprisingly tepid, made less exciting because of controls that make it a struggle to hit intended targets.

Enemies appear from everywhere in most levels of Bulletproof, and no matter how many you kill, they keep coming until you reach your finishing point. But the gun sights in the game don't lock onto foes, and the aiming feature is extremely sensitive to the touch. As a result, it's unusually hard to hit the opposition, even after a couple of hours of getting used to the game.

Bulletproof has decent graphics and sound, but a lot of lazy game-play elements. While most gamemakers tweak the level design to create natural barriers, 50 Cent and his crew will occasionally hit an invisible wall. The game also exposes some previously unknown weaknesses of the oft-shot rapper: According to the backward logic of the game, 50 Cent can survive after getting shot hundreds of times, but he dies instantly when jumping off a 10-foot ledge.

50 Cent: Bulletproof gets increasingly frustrating, and in the end even the music extras don't justify the $50 price. At more than $5 per gunshot wound, it's much more prudent to program "In da Club" as your ring tone and spend $49 on a game that doesn't suck.

Video game releases

For the week of Nov. 27 to Dec. 4 (partial list)

-- Burnout Legends for Nintendo DS

-- Guild Wars for PC

-- Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones for Xbox, PlayStation 2, GameCube and PC

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